


gone til november, on my city come december

by jamesstruttingpotter



Series: burn your love into the ground [1]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: As One Does, F/M, Non-Graphic Violence, mostly angst of the pining variety, police / undercover AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-23
Updated: 2019-01-23
Packaged: 2019-10-12 12:46:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17467829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jamesstruttingpotter/pseuds/jamesstruttingpotter
Summary: “He looked like he’d been in a fight recently.” Her voice is low and Raven stills. “He was holding himself off center, like his ribs were hurting, and there was a fading black eye.”“Bellamy is a grown man, and he’s a damn good cop,” Raven says, tone bracing. “You have to believe that he’s taking care of himself.”Clarke picks at the cardboard sleeve of her cup, thinks about the way Bellamy’s jaw had set against her presence last night, remembers how the freckles on his face look in the summer light from the precinct window. “He’s my partner,” she says, and she thinks Raven hears everything else she’s trying desperately to keep under the surface.“Yeah,” the other woman says. “Yeah, I know.”





	gone til november, on my city come december

**Author's Note:**

> maybe this was inspired by old episodes of brooklyn nine-nine and maybe it wasn't, you can't prove anything!! 
> 
> anyway, this really got away from me (i'm pretty sure it's the longest fic i've written?) but have some of these idiots being cops and worrying about each other and pining. i have absolutely no idea how law enforcement works so if you're at all involved in that field i'm so sorry but this is gonna be chock full of inaccuracies
> 
> as always, i am not at all up to date with the recent seasons of the show, but i hope you guys like it anyway!

She sees him for the first time in three months when she’s half-drunk at a club in Midtown.

Raven’s weight is pressed up against her side as they stumble back toward the bar, arm in arm. The lights are dim and shot through with random jets of primary colors, and music shudders its way past her teeth as she shouts for another gin and tonic.

Their other friends are probably still on the dance floor or squeezed into a booth at the periphery, maybe half an hour away from calling the whole night and heading a couple blocks over to their favorite pizzeria. Clarke smooths a hand down the gunmetal grey of her dress, expression rueful as she contemplates picking her way across snow-laden crosswalks in heels.

“Hey,” Raven yells, lips brushing against the whorl of her ear. “Stop being a fucking buzzkill and get us a couple shots of tequila while I try to get that girl’s number.”

Clarke feels her mouth untwist into a grin despite herself and watches Raven slide into the barstool a couple paces away. When she recalls these moments days later, she remembers thinking, _what the hell, it’s a Friday night,_ as _s_ he turns back to flag the bartender down again. She remembers catching the glint of an expensive watch in the dusk of the upper floor balconies out of the corner of her eye, remembers tipping her head up to look at it for no reason other than being pleasantly buzzed. She remembers her gaze slipping from the watch to the face of the man wearing it.

What she remembers most of all is her stomach lurching at the sight of Bellamy staring straight back at her.

She’s too shocked to do much other than stare back for half a second too long before he wrenches his eyes back to the people in the VIP booth with him, an easy smirk on his face as he leans back into the conversation. The familiar angle of his cheekbones, the way his curls brush at the nape of his neck - these details jolt her into sudden sobriety and she spins away from the bar, hand descending on Raven’s elbow and tugging her not-too-subtly out of her seat.

“Jesus fuck, Griffin, what the hell - “

“We have to get out of here,” Clarke interrupts, and the brisk urgency in her tone makes the other woman straighten up. “We might fuck up Bellamy’s op.”

Raven gapes. “He’s _here_?”

“We need to leave.” Clarke pulls her phone out and shoots a quick message to the group text - _heading to pizza place on 3rd, I’m buying for everyone who shows up in the next ten_.

“What are the fucking odds,” she can hear Raven mutter, and Clarke feels a familiar pounding start up again in her temples.

“Really fucking low,” she replies, and goes to grab their coats.

 

The next morning finds her rifling through the assorted briefings and case files on her desk, half-cold styrofoam cup of coffee clutched in one hand. After a couple minutes, she finally unearths the lone FBI file from the mess of Arkadia Police Department folders and flips it open.

Bellamy’s headshot stares back at her, paperclipped to the front page of the brief.

The file is thick with circumstantial evidence and glossy 8x10s of blood-spattered walls. His slanted scrawl draws attention to key passages in typed-up reports. Clarke can almost see the corkboard he’d set up in the precinct’s briefing room, how he’d visualized the ties between disparate pieces of evidence in a way that knitted a net around the Wallaces almost tight enough to ensnare them.

She’d helped him take that board down to send its contents to the FBI on the day they reached out to him and Kane about his operation. She had tucked these photos into a chronological stack as she watched Bellamy sit opposite a stern-looking fed in Kane’s office, words muffled by the door but expressions visible through the glass. Kane had looked thoughtful and engaged, the fed intent as he walked through the evidence he’d brought along with him, but Clarke had kept her eyes on the furrow in Bellamy’s brow as it had deepened, on the shape of his mouth as it jumped from surprise to settle on determination. Miller had intercepted him as soon as he left Kane’s office an hour later and Clarke had stopped shuffling notes to head over to them in the middle of the bullpen.

“What’s going on?” she’d asked, and Miller gave her one raised eyebrow - _careful_ , it said, as if she needed reminding - before slipping away. Bellamy’s scowl when he faced her looked strangely brittle, as if a filter had suddenly dropped over his features, and he huffed out a sigh.

“Feds took the Wallace case,” he’d told her, and she was sure he could feel the glances of people around them as keenly as she could.

She had kept her tongue in check and said the appropriate sympathetic things, had finished helping him pack up the evidence, had looked appropriately surprised a week later when he didn’t show up for work.

“Lastly, Blake is going to be on leave for an unspecified amount of time - Griffin, you’ll take point on his open cases but we don’t have the resources to assign you a temporary partner. Stop by my office after this to discuss how to divide up the casework with other teams,” Kane said. To the confused murmurs filling the room, he added, “Blake’s grandmother’s ill - he’s flown out to the Philippines to care for her.”

“Tough break,” Harper said to her on their way out of the briefing room, and Clarke had nodded and pretended to grimace at the thought of all that extra paperwork.

In Kane’s office she’d stood at stiff attention before his desk as he swept a hand over his eyes, shoulders sagging. “I’m sure I don’t have to fill in many gaps for you, Clarke,” he’d said, and she hadn’t let any muscle in her face move. “Officially, I’m not to tell you anything on the operation. You won’t be allowed to follow the case, or work it in any capacity.” His sigh had been long, drawn out. “Unofficially, all I have to say is that Blake’s good at what he does. The Bureau chose him for more reasons than his involvement in the case. I’d suggest you try to get through these next few months without worrying too much.”

Clarke had had no words to say in response to that suggestion, and at the look on her face Kane had turned to discussing Bellamy’s open casework.

She’d gotten home that night to find Bellamy sitting on her couch in the dark. They took a moment to stare at each other; she watched as he put the pieces together to know that she knew, then watched a couple seconds more as an unfamiliar expression crossed his face.

(She still thinks about that look sometimes in this haze of early midwinter nights, when the street lamps outside her window cast her bedroom in an eerie orange light and she watches her clock tick closer to early morning. Five years and counting of knowing Bellamy Blake’s every mood like the back of her own hand, of trusting him with some near-holy brand of unshakeable faith, and she’s finally found the one expression she can’t even begin to decipher.)

“Raven knows, she’s staying on as the APD contact for the case,” he’d told her, and Clarke felt her chin dip in a nod. He approached her then, slow and steady, as if afraid to spook her, and she’d felt her eyes close for a brief moment as his hand came to settle on her shoulder. “I’ll be back in a few months,” he said, voice quiet in the dark, and she’d thought, wildly and for a split second, of locking the door behind her and refusing to move.

His palm had been warm against her collarbone.

“Bellamy, wait,” she’d started as he moved past her to leave, words tearing themselves out of her mouth in a jagged rush, and he’d jerked back to face her again. Her nails had dug into her thigh, heart nearly threatening to leap out of her chest, but even in the eleventh hour she’d faltered. “Does Octavia know?” she asked instead.

The same inscrutable expression covered his features. “Yes,” he’d told her, and then he was gone.

She thinks about these last moments again as the weekend squad shuffles around the precinct. A twitch of movement out of the corner of her eye alerts her to Kane at his desk, pretending not to watch her. She distantly realizes her phone has been buzzing intermittently for the last few minutes; a quick check of the screen shows five new messages from Raven.

_[10:34am]_

_Fuck I just woke up_

_[10:34am]_

_Where tf are you_

_[10:39am]_

_Are you at the precinct_

_[10:40am]_

_I can meet you at Grounds in an hour_

_[10:45am]_

_I’m sorry, Clarke. I should’ve realized_

She bites her lip and shoots off a quick reply, agreeing to meet at the cafe. Then she takes a seat at her desk, throws away her now-completely cold styrofoam cup of coffee, and reviews the few pages in the manila FBI folder Bellamy had dog-eared.

The first page is the cursory background on the Wallace crime family, with Bellamy’s usual tangle of terse, precise notes on the black market organ trade the APD has suspected Dante Wallace of feeding in Arkadia over the last half-decade. There’s a grainy profile shot of Cage Wallace, heir apparent, and a department-standard sketch of Dante, shakily pieced together from a defecting gang member’s testimony before he was found drained of blood the next day. Clarke scans a more recent page of notes that looks to be a harried transcript of a call Bellamy took with one of his CIs: _running out of bodies; need sustainable cycle; drugs compromise organ functionality; prostitution?_ The last word is underlined and circled in a heavy hand.

She remembers him talking through the details of this with her late one night at the precinct, half-forgotten cartons of Thai sitting on their desk, him leaning back in his chair to stare at the fluorescents above them as he hypothesized out loud. “It makes sense, right? There’s only so many kidnappings and murders the organization can commit before they run up against a wall, and what little we’ve learned about Dante suggests he’s not happy with such a brute force approach. There are a lot of existing networks in place for prostitution that they could easily tap into with the right contacts, and law enforcement barely pays attention as is - if a couple prostitutes go missing every few months, there’s less likelihood that their murders would be reported or solved than the murder of a rich lawyer out jogging.”

He had gone to Kane to request the resources to expand his investigation in this direction, maybe pulling a couple cops from Vice - not a month later, the FBI had shown up at their door.

Like she’s allowed herself to do only once before, Clarke pores over the most recent documents in the file to find any hint of why the Bureau had decided an undercover operation was necessary. The clues are frustratingly scarce - while it’s true that Bellamy’s lead into the crime family’s expansion into prostitution was getting them closer to being able to pin some crimes on either Cage or Dante, there’s no mention of how an undercover operative would be valuable, what role they could fulfill for the Bureau, and (most critically) how dangerous the job would be. She leaves the precinct 45 minutes later with no more answers than she had before and the renewed threat of a headache.

Raven is already at Grounds when she enters the shop and has two large coffees on the table in front of her. Clarke makes a beeline for the caffeine and takes a gulp before unzipping her jacket and sitting down; Raven watches this with shrewd eyes and leans forward as Clarke settles in. “You need to stop trying to solve the case.”

“That’s not what I’m doing,” Clarke objects.

Raven waves a dismissive hand in the air. “I don’t mean the actual case, I mean the case of why it happened with him and why now. If he’d known this might be necessary, it’d be in his version of the files. And he would’ve told you about it before it happened,” she adds, almost as an afterthought.

“Why was he there last night?” Clarke tries, and the other woman shifts in her seat.

“You know I can’t tell you anything.”

“You obviously didn’t realize it was a possibility he’d be there, which means things might be off-track. Is he winging it? Is he acting off orders?”

Raven’s lips press together. “Isn’t it enough to know he’s safe?”

“ _Is_ he?” Her voice is louder than she means for it to be; at the stares of the men at the table next to them, Clarke works to keep her tone level. “He looked like shit, Raven, you didn’t see - “

“I don’t _know_. I don’t know anything like that. I’m not his handler, I’m not even the main contact on his case, I’m the person they kept on as a courtesy to the APD. I’m in the Intelligence Bureau, I’m not even a real cop to them.”

“Don’t say that,” Clarke says automatically, and Raven waves a hand again. There’s a beat of silence during which both of them take aggressively normal sips of coffee. Then - “He looked like he’d been in a fight recently.” Her voice is low and Raven stills. “He was holding himself off center, like his ribs were hurting, and there was a fading black eye.”

“Bellamy is a grown man, and he’s a damn good cop,” Raven says, tone bracing. “You have to believe that he’s taking care of himself.”

Clarke picks at the cardboard sleeve of her cup, thinks about the way Bellamy’s jaw had set against her presence last night, remembers how the freckles on his face look in the summer light from the precinct window. “He’s my partner,” she says, and she thinks Raven hears everything else she’s trying desperately to keep under the surface.

“Yeah,” the other woman says. “Yeah, I know.”

 

Miller shows up on her doorstep later that night, six pack of beer in one hand and Chinese takeout in the other. “Want some company?” he asks, already stepping inside and kicking off his sneakers.

Clarke folds her arms in front of her chest. “What’d Raven say?”

“That you’re probably a mess,” he replies, not missing a beat as he heads to her kitchen. “Think they forgot a couple egg rolls.”

“Bullshit, I know you ate them on the way over.”

“Wow, awesome detecting skills, Detective Griffin. Monty’s probably coming with more beer.”

Monty does show up, and between his six pack of beer and Miller’s they get tipsy over a messy game of Pandemic. Monty insists on playing the same Tinashe song over and over until Clarke and Miller confiscate his phone as penance, and by the time the two of them are putting their shoes back on, Clarke feels almost like it’s been a normal Saturday night.

Miller exchanges a quick look with Monty, who gives Clarke a hug and steps outside. She leans against her doorjamb to regard Miller with a dry look.

“You’re not nearly as subtle as you think you are,” she informs him.

He shrugs. “Don’t know why you think I’m trying to be subtle.”

“I’m fine,” she says.

He shrugs again, keeps his eyes fixed on a point just over her shoulder. “I miss him too,” he offers, just as the silence gets to be too much, and for some reason that’s what threatens to make her tears spill over.

Instead, she gives Miller a tight hug and sees him to the door, then heads straight to bed. Her sheets are cool to the touch and she buries her face in a pillow, thinks about the shape of the bruise as it bloomed over Bellamy’s cheekbone, and concentrates on taking slow breaths.

 

The next few months pass slowly. Clarke works double shifts plus overtime, as if nearly killing herself in an attempt to solve all of Bellamy’s open cases herself will somehow bring him back. She learns to read Raven’s body language as a marker for how close they’re getting to Wallace, and in turn, how close Bellamy is likely getting to trouble. A few weeks pass where Raven consumes nothing but coffee and protein bars, passing out on the break room couch in sporadic bursts, and at the end of it she quietly tells Clarke that he’s been established as a reliable contact. The feds have apparently told her this is a cause for celebration; all Clarke can think is that it’s taken almost half a year to get to square one.

It’s this thought that spurs her to find the FBI case file again on a late night when most of the bullpen has gone home. She stares at it for half a moment before getting up suddenly, file in hand, to head to the copy room. Before she can second guess herself, she’s made copies of all the pages and tucked them into a blank folder, which she then slips into her purse.

She’s jittery for the whole subway ride home, feels strangers’ eyes on her as she walks to her apartment and locks her door behind her. She flicks on her kitchen light and fishes the papers out of her bag to spread out on her table, arranging them in the exact order Bellamy had had them on the precinct corkboard. She stares at them for a long while, thoughts jumbling together as she fights through a sudden feeling of panic, then makes herself a cup of coffee and sits down to reread everything.

It becomes second nature to get home from work and spend time poring over the documents, TV playing in the background and takeout on the counter. She pins a map of the city up on her wall and uses it to track known activity, both from the Wallaces and the city’s prostitution rings, which Bellamy had been starting to stake out before he got pulled. The territories don’t overlap at all, and neither of them are close to the club she saw him at - no amount of rereading helps her reconcile this.

(These are the moments she feels Bellamy’s absence the most: when five years of having him at her shoulder has rewired her instincts to look for him at every roadblock. She can see him, almost, a figure sitting at her periphery, one hand scrubbing over his face as he leans back to say, “Alright, let’s go through what we know again.”)

This odd feeling of urgency, of feeling like she’s rushing against the clock despite no new information, is only heightened by the feeling that Kane _knows_ something about the case that he can’t tell her. He’s taken to stopping by Clarke’s desk to cast a glance at Bellamy’s still-empty chair, a move that makes her grit her teeth. Once, when no one else was looking, he’d dropped a quick hand on her shoulder, as if to say he _understood_ , and she had automatically jerked up and away from his touch. He’s largely left her alone after that, but she can sometimes feel him watching her from his office. The concern on his face makes her feel worse, somehow, and she throws herself deeper into the files at home on those nights.

She knows she’s been getting distant and uncommunicative with her friends, too. She’ll catch Monty looking at her sometimes with something too close to pity to be comfortable, and her phone can testify to how many times she’s ignored Lincoln’s attempts to get her to hang out with the rest of them. So she’s not too surprised when there’s a sudden loud banging on her front door late on a Sunday morning, Raven’s voice loud from the other side. She gets to the hallway in time to catch the tail end of the sentence: “ - in there, Griffin, open up and let me in.”

She yanks the door open. “I have neighbors, Raven, what - “ The expression on the other woman’s face cuts her short. “What’s wrong?”

She shoves Clarke aside to get into the apartment before she can protest; Clarke catches up to her just as she sees the mess of paperwork covering her kitchen table. She has a tangle of excuses on the tip of her tongue, ready to deploy, but Raven interjects before she can even open her mouth. “I’m only telling you this because the Bureau is being secretive as fuck and I’m worried,” she says, and the edge of fear in her voice makes Clarke’s heart beat double time. She thrusts a sheaf of papers at her; Clarke immediately identifies the emails of the Bureau agents in charge of the Wallace case before scanning the missives. Phrases like “sensitive nature of operation,” “more comprehensive set of resources in-house,” and “national scope of network” jump out at her. The most recent sentence from an Agent Pike reads, “Given both Officer Reyes’ personal connection to the asset and given recent events, we believe it would be more beneficial to the operation if the Bureau took a more internally-holistic approach to staffing at this time.”

Clarke looks up to meet Raven’s grim expression. “What does this mean?”

“It means I’ve been taken off the case.” She has half a second to think that this doesn’t warrant banging her door down in the middle of a Sunday before Raven says, “And I’m pretty sure Bellamy was just shot.”

It’s like she’s underwater, suddenly, the way sound distorts after that sentence. She’s dimly aware of Raven explaining the last twelve hours, how a deal Bellamy was trying to make with the Wallaces had gone sideways, how the FBI asset on the other side of the deal had mistaken Bellamy for an actual gang member and refused to negotiate, how the whole meeting had devolved into a gunfight with multiple dead or wounded. The world snaps back into technicolor focus when Raven says she was cut out of Bureau communications before she could find out whether Bellamy was among the dead, and suddenly she’s got her keys in her hand and a jacket slung over her shoulders. “Was he taken to a hospital?” she asks, and Raven’s eyes are wide with disbelief.

“No, they have a doctor in-house - wait, you can’t be thinking of going out there, are you _insane_ \- “

“Then they’ll be set up in a safe house, close to the altercation, which means the one close to the docks on First - are you coming?”

“Coming _where?_ Clarke, I didn’t tell you so you could go find him - !”

“Lock up for me, then,” she says, and runs down the stairs two at a time.

It’s jarringly bright out, sunlight reflecting off banks of old snow, and Clarke throws herself into the driver’s seat of her car. The adrenaline in her blood at finally having something to do feels like painful relief as she turns her engine on and starts navigating south. Her phone keeps chiming in the seat next to her, no doubt from Raven, but she ignores it for the wholedrive. The traffic is, like on all other weekends, relatively light, but she finds herself jumpy and impatient at red lines, less forgiving of slow rental cars as they clog up the streets at thirty five miles an hour. Her speedometer doesn’t dip below fifty.

She forces herself to slow down as soon as she gets close to the relevant neighborhood, heartbeats sharp and anxious in her chest as she checks mailbox numbers for the right address.

A gleaming _1174 First Avenue_ sign jumps out at her a couple houses away and she hits the brakes to pull onto the curb a safe distance away.

She reaches mechanically to turn her engine off.

The sudden absence of motion and sound makes her thoughts swirl faster: What if no one’s in the safe house? Does that mean everyone from the Wallace camp is safe, or does it mean that there was no one left to save? If they’re in the safe house, does this mean someone was injured so badly that they’re still operating on him hours later? Is this even where they would’ve taken him? Are the people inside busy trying to save someone else’s life?

Is she watching for someone who died half a day earlier seven blocks away?

 _Hey,_ says Bellamy’s voice. _Stakeouts are about patience. You know that better than anyone, Clarke._

She takes a deep, shaking breath and checks her phone.

_[11:23am]_

_Is this a fucking joke, Clarke_

_[11:24am]_

_If you get yourself killed I swear to Christ_

_[11:39am]_

_Call me immediately_

_[11:40am]_

_I can’t believe you think this is a good idea_

_[11:46am]_

_Jesus you’ve got a lot of paperwork at your place you’re fucking neurotic_

_[12:01pm]_

_Can you at least give me an update_

Clarke types out, _Just arrived,_ and hits send. Less than thirty seconds later, Raven calls her.

“Get the fuck out of there,” she says as soon as she picks up, and Clarke frowns.

“Give me some time, I haven’t seen any movement yet.”

“That’s even more reason to get out of there now, before they see you!”

“I never officially worked this case, they’d have no reason to know my face,” she reasons, and Raven scoffs. “Listen, I just - I need to at least try to see him. I won’t engage or anything, I’m not an idiot, I just need to see he’s alive. It’s not like the Bureau is going to tell you shit, especially since it sounds like this went sideways because of their own incompetence - “

“Kane’s already asking that we get looped into his status, if not the mission; there’s no reason for you to go _fucking rogue_ \- “

“Hey!” A sharp rap on her passenger side window startles the shit out of her. Clarke looks to see a vaguely familiar man leaning a forearm against the top of her car. Raven’s gone dead silent on the line. She rolls down the window and gives the man - _lieutentant, she thinks, mid-ranking_ \- an annoyed look. “What are you doing here?” he asks her.

“Waiting for my boyfriend to get home,” she says, letting her tone slide into half boredom, half irritation. She can see another man behind him already sending a text, presumably to someone inside the safe house.

“Can’t wait inside his place?” the first guy asks, and Clarke spares a disparaging thought for how unsubtle some criminals are.

“He broke up with me and took his key back, thanks for asking.” She lets her irritation bump up a couple notches. “Why do you care where I’m parked? It’s a free country.”

The guy scowls at her. “Get the fuck out of here, lady. Only gonna ask once.”

She opens her mouth to make another remark but he’s already stepping away, arms crossed over his chest in a clear invitation to keep driving. She rolls up her window and weighs her options very quickly, thinks for a split second what would happen if she refuses, before a flicker of movement at the safe house catches her attention.

Bellamy steps out of the front door and onto the porch, gaze immediately zeroing in on her car.

The relief that crashes over her body is like surfacing after a riptide: it almost hurts to breathe as she watches him register her presence for the second time in four months. She doesn’t dare take more than half a second to look at him, but even that’s enough to notice how pale he is, the awkward angle at which his arm hangs, the bulkiness under his shirt suggesting mounds of gauze wrapped around his shoulder.

His face is absolutely devoid of emotion. She hears Raven’s voice in her head - _He’s a damn good cop_ \- and forces herself to look away. Her hands are stiff as she turns her key in its slot and puts the car into gear, and she keeps her gaze straight ahead as she passes him.

 

When she gets back to her apartment, Raven wastes no time in throwing a couch pillow at her head. “You’re an idiot, Griffin,” she says, and Clarke puts her keys down on the coffee table with shaking hands. Raven’s phone is there, lit up with a call from Octavia on speakerphone, who accosts her almost immediately.

“Did you see him? What’s going on? Was he okay?”

“I saw him,” Clarke says, and her voice is tired even to her own ears. “He’s okay. I think it was a through and through in his shoulder.”

“They’re not telling me shit,” Octavia says, angry, and Clarke remembers with a jolt that the FBI has committed to giving Octavia only the most critical of updates. If it’d been bad enough for them to reach out to her, the Bureau had likely lost tabs on him for several hours after the shootout. She thinks absently about how they might have phrased the notice, about if there’s a good way to tell someone their brother might be dead.

“I don’t know anything else,” she says, “but I think he’s safe. His cover hasn’t been blown, at least.”

“Fuck that,” Octavia spits, and she sounds dangerously close to tears. “Fuck his cover, and fuck this mission. It’s been _seven months_ , how much longer are they going to make him go through this? He has a fucking life, people who care about him, they can’t make him keep - “

“He knows what he signed up to do,” Raven interrupts, not unkind, and Octavia takes a shuddering breath before hanging up abruptly.

Raven stays for a couple more hours, perusing the documents on Clarke’s table and adding a couple of her own notes as Clarke heats up leftover Indian food. She takes off in the early afternoon with a stern look and a, “Take a nap, you look like shit.” The front door slides shut behind her with a quiet _snick_.

Clarke dumps the dirty dishes in her sink and, faced with an afternoon of deafening silence, decides to take her advice, 3pm or not. She changes into an old t-shirt and sweatpants and lies down, convinced she’ll be tossing and turning for the next few hours. Instead, she sinks into dreamless unconsciousness within seconds, as if her body has given up after running on nothing but anxiety and fear for the past few hours.

She might not have woken up until the next morning if there hadn’t been a quiet thump in her living room.

She’s awake instantly, eyes gritty and adjusting to the sudden darkness outside. She slides out of bed and pauses for a second, enough to confirm shuffling noises coming from outside her bedroom. Her service weapon is sitting on her bedside table and she grabs it, checking for ammo before creeping toward the door. Through the slight crack she notices nothing but darkness; she moves quickly to open the door and enter the hallway, taking a quick breath before whipping around to face the intruder in her living room, gun outstretched before her.

Bellamy’s face is drawn as he stares at her, hands up.

She can’t process the sight for a couple seconds. Her palms are suddenly slick with sweat against the cool metal of her firearm and she un-cocks it quickly before lowering it, a choked sound escaping her throat without her permission. “What _the fuck_ are you doing here?”

“I could’ve asked you the same question,” he says, and before she can stop herself -

“This is my apartment,” she replies, and suddenly his expression is furious.

“This isn’t a fucking joke, Clarke, what the hell were you thinking this morning? You could’ve gotten yourself killed!”

Her anger is white noise, crackling up her spine with surprising speed. “ _I_ could’ve gotten _myself_ killed?” she demands. “What happened last night? Your shoulder is - “

“I’m doing my job, not hanging around active gang territory with no license to be there in any official capacity!” he snaps back.

“I was fucking _worried_ , Bellamy!”

“Worried? As if that fucking excuses anything you just did - “

“Raven comes into my apartment with emails saying she’s being taken off your case after a shootout where no one knows what the hell happened to you!” she shouts, and steamrolls over any attempt to interrupt. “They told Octavia to prepare for the worst, as if that would help her _at all_ , and I was tired of sitting around on my ass waiting for you to _do your job_ while the Bureau keeps us all in the dark! So yes, I was _worried_ that you’d been made, or shot, or fucking _dead_ , while the Bureau just spins its wheels trying to find out!”

He clenches his jaw and glares at her, unrelenting. There’s a terse silence for a couple of seconds before he bites out, “You shouldn’t waste your time worrying.”

And that’s honestly the final straw, she thinks, as a swell of emotion threatens to blot out any rational thought she might have. It’s been seven months since the last time they’ve spoken and he’s broken into her apartment in the dead of night, wearing an unfamiliar button down and expensive jeans the real Bellamy wouldn’t be caught dead in, to tell her she shouldn’t have bothered checking on him even though she knows, _knows_ with the same unshakeable faith she has in him always having her back, that he’d do the same for her in a heartbeat. It’s been seven months and she’d forgotten how his hair curls when he lets it grow too long, but she knows like instinct what the anger in his voice is trying to hide, how deep the frisson of fear at seeing her in the car this morning goes.

It’s been seven months too long, and she misses him with an ache in her chest that threatens to lay her low and ruin her.

She puts her gun down, slow and steady, and watches his eyes widen as she gets closer, feels how his shoulders slump in fractions as she wraps her arms around his torso.

“I’m always going to worry about you,” she tells him, and his heartbeat echoes loud and reassuring under her ear.

He leaves only minutes later, muttering something about having to get back before his people notice. But in the weightless in-between time, she manages to show him a couple new photos of his niece, tells him a funny story about Jasper’s latest Tinder date, drinks in the sound of his low laughter in the curious dusk that blankets winter midnights. He presses his lips to her brow before he slips out and she gives herself a moment to watch him go before closing the door behind him.

 

A week later, Raven’s reinstated on the case. She tells Clarke Bellamy has insisted on intel vetted by APD, gleeful as she describes the Bureau’s frustration, then grudging acceptance. Kane calls them both into his office hours later and fixes Clarke with an appraising look as soon as she sits down.

“If I were to suspend you for two weeks for unofficially working a case, would you tell me I was making a mistake?” he asks her, and she says nothing. He sighs and hands her a familiar-looking manila folder, FBI logo stamped on the front. “The Bureau’s clearing APD involvement with the Wallace case. This’ll at least give you use of official resources.”

 _Smart move, Bellamy,_ she thinks.

It’s clear that Agent Pike isn’t thrilled about the additions to his team, but he agrees to meet with Clarke to discuss latest developments. “We have him posing as an up and comer in the burgeoning South Asian prostitution trade,” he tells her in his office. As if he can read her mind, he continues, “Blake is… not pleased with his cover, but recognizes it’s the best shot we’ve got. We have a couple agents acting as members of his organization and we’re working hard to bust the Wallaces before they start asking for more than a couple of bodies as proof.”

“What progress has been made?” she asks.

“A few months ago, Blake managed to secure meetings with Cage Wallace to convince him that a partnership between their organizations would be mutually beneficial. Wallace was hesitant, as expected, but Blake was able to convince him to at least do a trial run. Wallace would give Blake’s organization access to their transportation network around the city, and in return, Blake would promise the Wallaces a certain number of bodies per transaction. That’s what went awry a week ago - “ here Pike’s face twists with displeasure - “when there was an internal miscommunication and our asset within the Wallace organization refused to cooperate with Blake. The good news is that the Wallaces took Blake under their wing to make sure he recuperated after the shootout, and Dante Wallace has visited Blake to personally apologize for the mix-up. There’s been talk of another try getting scheduled for sometime next month, with Cage and Dante personally overseeing the transaction.”

“And your plan is… what? You can’t be thinking of actually procuring and then selling prostitutes to the Wallaces.”

Pike has the decency to look abashed. “Not at all, Griffin. Given the circumstances, we’re thinking of arresting them as they show up to make the deal.”

“That’s a big fucking move,” Raven says when Clarke fills her in later at their own precinct. “They’re really depending on Bellamy to bring them to the site in person?”

Clarke takes a deep breath, contemplates taking an aspirin. “Yeah. They want me to hang back a little and help you with data collection,” she says, drawing air quotes around the last two words.

“Yeah, because that’s all my job is,” Raven mutters. “Whatever, I don’t have anything they don’t know already. I think Bellamy’s doing fine. His shoulder’s been getting better and they’ve been treating him real nicely after one of their guys shot him.”

“They must really need his business,” Clarke says, thoughtful. “Which is weird. Why would they trust a newcomer to the scene over any of the other contacts they could make who’ve been in Arkadia for a longer time?”

“Probably years of bad blood and territory catfights,” Raven points out. “The Wallaces allying with any of the big crime families would really tip the scales, power-wise.”

“I guess there’s no way the other families would be okay with a big alliance threatening to wipe them out.”

“They’ve been trying to keep this whole thing on the down low, I think that’s why Dante was so pissed that the shootout happened. The other families have definitely heard about that at this point. I think that’s why everyone’s willing to push the second attempt off for another month.”

Clarke rubs a hand over her face. “Great. More time for me to kill.”

Raven lets out a humorless chuckle. “Yeah, we’re all on standby here.” She stands up from her desk to stretch, then punches Clarke’s shoulder lightly. “Come on, at least you’re officially on the team now. Does this mean you’re joining us for drinks tonight?”

Clarke smiles, thin but genuine. “Yeah, fuck it. I need a cider after all this.”

“ _Cider_? Shots all the way, Griffin. Come on, you’re paying first round.”

 

A couple weeks pass during which the Wallaces do a lot of nothing, and Bellamy’s quick calls to Pike consist of no new information. In the one Clarke happens to overhear while sitting in Pike’s office, Bellamy’s deep voice bleeds through the cheap plastic of the desk phone as he says, “Cage is blowing a lot of cash on stupid shit like clubbing and dragging me along, but I don’t think it’s to make any new connections. He’s just getting drunk and going home with women.”

“Fine. Let’s pause on these calls for now, then - don’t call again until something happens,” Pike instructs. “I’ll have our plainclothes keeping an eye on you for safety, but don’t draw attention to yourself with these conversations.”

Clarke bites her tongue to keep from letting him know she’s here listening, but from Pike’s raised eyebrow as he hangs up, she thinks maybe her poker face needs more work.

Maybe it’s unrelated, but he refuses to assign her as one of the officers keeping an eye on Bellamy from far away, and she grudgingly agrees with the decision - while she’s sure Bellamy could keep his cover without worrying now that he knows she’s assigned to the case, she’s not sure she could do the same. It’s already simultaneously easier and harder to be on the case in an official capacity. On one hand, getting relevant information on his status as soon as it’s available, having the right to access that information, is addictive in its sense of overwhelming relief. But she finds that no matter how much information is included in the updates, it’s not enough to satiate her need to know what exactly is happening to him. She’s lived the past five years on the ground next to him, watching him work their cases with a singular drive to do it well and do it _right_ , and it’s excruciating to get curt, toneless missives filtered by the Bureau with little regard for how he’s feeling, what he’s doing with his time, how his shoulder is healing, whether he’s eating properly.

She spends her off hours filling blank sketchbooks with the look on his face as he stood across from her in her living room, the way his mouth had quirked up at pictures of Octavia’s daughter, the dark hollows under his eyes that hadn’t gone away even as he’d relaxed into her touch.

(She still spends early morning hours watching her clock, washed in street light orange, tick closer to dawn, thinking about the look on his face when he’d said goodbye eight months ago. She thinks she’s maybe close to cracking this case too.)

Ultimately and somewhat predictably, things go south because they let their guard down. Raven stops by Clarke’s desk on a Tuesday afternoon to let her know that the plainclothes have lost sight of Bellamy for a moment, which, while a little worrying, isn’t necessarily unusual. Clarke’s buried in filling out paperwork for a different case when Raven swings by, so while she asks to be kept updated, it’s nothing more than a buzz in the back of her mind for a few hours.

By 5pm, Pike’s called Kane directly, and Kane calls her into his office.

Raven’s already there, fierce furrow in her brow as she flips through surveillance camera feeds on her laptop at a terrifying pace. Pike’s voice is terse but measured through the speakerphone: “ - could just be regular movement, but his phone’s been left somewhere in Midtown and we’re having a hard time tracking the car. Looks like the license plates have been removed or swapped out, and there’s a million black sedans in this city.”

Clarke feels dread start to pool in her stomach.

“What’s happening?” she asks Kane, who keeps his eyes fixed on Raven’s work.

“Reyes is trying to find him via traffic cams now. Last known location is 5th and 43rd, but we don’t think he stopped anywhere there, just lost his phone or had it taken from him as they passed by. We’re hearing little to no chatter about any movement, so it’s possible that this is just a mix-up.”

“Yeah, or they’ve caught onto the fact that he’s a cop and are keeping quiet on the channels they now suspect are tapped,” Raven mutters, and Clarke’s gut is telling her that this scenario is the most likely one. From the silence over the line, Pike seems to be thinking the same thing.

“We shouldn’t jump to any conclusions yet,” Kane says. “Pike, what else is being done? Can APD help in any way?”

“We should be covered with the three tac teams we have on standby,” Pike says. “Griffin should head over to HQ immediately if she’s going to be a part of this.”

“I think Griffin will be staying here with Reyes to monitor the situation,” Kane says, more an order than a suggestion.

“Absolutely not,” Clarke replies, flat, and he finally looks at her for the first time.

“I’m not sending an emotionally compromised officer to the scene. That’s a recipe for disaster and you know it as well as I do.”

“All due respect,” she grits out, “but I’ll be there with or without official clearance.”

“I don’t need her here,” Raven offers, grim. “I’ve found the sedan. Looks like a warehouse by the docks where the shootout was.” She spins the screen around to show them the feed: two unfamiliar men are holding an unconscious figure between them by the arms and dragging him to the building. Cage Wallace follows at a leisurely pace, turning around once to fire a bullet into the camera Raven’s using to watch them.

Even with the bag over his head, Clarke would have recognized that figure anywhere.

“Marcus, let me go,” Clarke says, and something in her voice must tip him off.

“Do you really think you being there is what’s best for him?” he asks her, oddly gentle.

“He’s my partner,” she says, and doesn’t stick around for his reaction.

(She pauses in her race to her car only to stop by Miller’s desk. “Clarke, what the hell?“

“They made him; he’s unconscious in a warehouse on First,” she says, and his eyes narrow with intent as he jumps up and follows her out.)

 

The GPS coordinates Pike sends her are a couple of blocks away from the warehouse and already buzzing with activity when they arrive. He waves her over to where he’s standing with a couple officers in tac gear, looking at a set of blueprints. “There are three floors and we don’t know which one he’s on,” he tells her, and she surveys their plan as she straps on her bulletproof vest.

“How many men do they have?” Miller asks.

Pike gives him a once-over before answering his question. “Unclear. We could sweep for heat signatures, but that would likely take too much time. They haven’t released any ransom information or even tried to reach out to us, so we’re not sure what their plan is.” He turns to assess her with a cool gaze. “He could be dead in there, Griffin. Are you sure you want to go in?”

She doesn’t dignify that with a response, instead choosing to make sure her firearm is fully loaded; he shrugs and goes to assemble his people.

She’ll never fully remember every detail from the next few minutes. There are flashes of sensations instead: rough pavement under her, the heaviness of her Kevlar, the incredibly loud sound of her breathing echoing inside her head as she jogs toward the back entrance of the warehouse with two feds and Miller at her side. There’s another tac team covering them from behind, a sniper on a nearby roof, and a final tac team taking the front entrance. Pike’s voice is a deep, unintelligible rumble in her left ear and she focuses on the shadowy shuffle of boots in front of her as they get closer and closer.

Her mind clicks back into gear once they reach the edifice, a young-looking fed she’s never seen before leading the charge, and suddenly every millisecond of this is both slower and faster than time should be.

The door isn’t locked; the young guy kicks it in immediately, shield up and gun outstretched. Clarke takes a moment to case the room, notices stacks of unmarked boxes littering the tiny space before a dark shadow starts racing toward them. Miller fires, quick and crisp; the shadow falls and doesn’t move again.

She’s first to the next door and presses against the wall to peer around the entryway, but the quickly-falling gloom makes it almost impossible to see anything clearly.

“Light switch here,” says someone behind her, and when the overheads flick on, three figures freeze for a second before ducking and starting to fire from a series of shelves. Bullets ricochet off the steel door and burrow themselves into the walls and boxes behind them. She takes careful aim at one man who’s inching closer, fires off a couple shots that catch him in the kneecap and elbow.

Miller is suddenly beside her, gun barking, and he yells, “Stairs on the other side of the wall, I’ve got this, go!” She immediately propels herself forward and sideways, slamming her ribcage against the lip of the stairs with her momentum. She barely feels the impact, just scrambles up and runs, narrowly missing a bullet that embeds itself into the wall by her ear.

The second floor opens up to a narrow hallway with two doors on either side of her; she picks the first one on the left at random and yanks it open to find nothing but moonlight. The door directly opposite yields one unfamiliar figure not wearing a tac vest. She quickly fires, center mass, and the figure drops. There’s another door at the other side of the room and she bites her lip, quickly weighing whether to keep going deeper or go back out to the hallway, when a sudden burst of light and a loud shout comes from the room beyond.

She runs across the floor and slams her back against the wall before grasping the handle and throwing the door open; a quick glance shows her one FBI-emblazoned vest kneeling on the ground next to a man tied to a chair, bathed in fluorescent lights. Her heart threatens to choke her as it jumps into her throat.

It takes all her effort to enter the room slowly, arms raised, and to identify herself with a steady voice so the FBI agent won’t shoot her from adrenaline. He waves her into the room and, at her sudden rush, takes a step back from Bellamy - because that’s who it is, slumped and bleeding steadily from several wounds, but Bellamy nevertheless, and she collapses on the ground behind him to tear at the rope binding his wrists together.

“Fuck,” she says, dimly registering his lack of response to her movements, and she gives up on the knots to kneel in front of him. She cups his face in her hands, tries to get him to open his eyes. “Bellamy, come on, it’s me, wake up - we have to get you out of here. Bellamy!”

His eyelids flutter, and with great effort he coughs out her name. “Clarke? What - “

“Jesus Christ, thank God, I - “ She grabs at her comm and reports, “We’ve found Blake, he’s on the second floor, northwest corner. I repeat, second floor, northwest corner. Will need immediate medical attention.”

“On my way,” Miller says immediately, and she finds half a second to feel relief at her friend’s voice before there’s a yelp from behind her; she turns just in time to see the FBI agent clutching at his thigh, dark blood seeping through his uniform. He’s put out of his misery seconds later.

Her gun is just inches away from her right hand. Cage Wallace shoots at the ground in front of her before she can lunge for it.

“Clarke Griffin,” he says, almost conversational as he aims the muzzle of his gun at her forehead, “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“Clarke.” Bellamy’s voice is thin but urgent. “Clarke, run.”

Cage ignores him. “After I was told that Blake was a cop, I did a lot of digging. I wanted to know who he was, what company he kept. Who he loved,” he says, and a small part of her that isn’t panicking really can’t believe that she’s hearing about Bellamy’s feelings for the first time now, like this. “I thought about going after his family - he’s got so little left, as I’m sure you know - but you really made it easy for me by trying to come get him.” He cocks the hammer. “Thanks for waking him up for this, by the way.”

In the split second before he squeezes the trigger, she dives for her Glock and feels her fingers wrap around it; there’s a sudden wave of heat that blossoms across her side, then a reverberating thud as a body hits the ground.

The world goes grey.

 

The next thing she registers the gentle heat of sunshine against her forehead. She feels groggy, as if waking up from a cold, and she momentarily wonders if she drank too much last night.

The second thing she notices is a hand wrapped tightly around hers.

Memories come roaring back to her immediately, of dirty scuffed floors and bruises on freckled skin, and she opens her eyes with a gasp.

“Whoa, Clarke, take it easy - slow down,” she hears, and she turns her head to see Bellamy sitting next to her, brow furrowed with concern. There’s a distant beeping noise that she realizes is her heart monitor; it’s racing.

“Bellamy,” she says, and he tightens his grip on her hand.

“Me,” he replies, and suddenly a couple tears are trailing down her face.

“Oh, don’t do that, princess,” he says, voice a little off-kilter. His fingers free themselves from hers to wipe at her cheeks. “Come on, I bet you didn’t even miss me.”

“Shut the fuck up,” she tells him, before tugging him down for a kiss.

He tastes like gum and smells exactly the same. There’s a split second of rigidity where he doesn’t move at all, almost long enough for Clarke to wonder if she’s horribly misread every moment she’s been thinking about since maybe the day she met him. But then his surprise fades and he's kissing her back, mouth firm and exploratory against hers, better than every time she's let herself imagine. Her fingers curl into his hair, still longer than he usually keeps it, and his hands remain gentle and still on her shoulders. She can’t figure out why until she twists the wrong way to get closer to him and falls back, hiss of pain escaping.

“Great, you guys stopped,” comes Miller’s dry voice from the other side of the room. She looks over to see him, Octavia, and Raven at the door. “Conscious for five seconds and already making out, Christ.”

Bellamy’s cheeks are rapidly staining a dark pink.

Clarke clears her throat, pointedly ignoring the looks on both Octavia and Raven’s faces. “What happened?”

Raven perches on the edge of the bed, propping her crutches up next to her as she sobers a little. “You tried to be a big damn hero, that’s what happened.”

Clarke frowns. “Alright, someone else give me the summary.”

“I got there just as Wallace started to fire,” Miller says, and Bellamy twitches, involuntary. “He clipped your lower side, right above your hip. You’d already radioed in for EMTs for Bellamy, so luckily we were able to get you both to the hospital pretty quickly. You’ve been out for about half a day, recovering from surgery.”

“Anyone else hurt?” she asks, and Miller looks at his hands.

“A couple casualties. Everyone else was minor injuries.” Clarke remembers the FBI agent who’d found Bellamy first and feels a knot of guilt and gratitude well up in her chest.

“Bellamy should still be in bed, though,” Octavia interjects, making him scowl.

“Mild dehydration and a couple bruises are nothing, O,” he says, and she scoffs.

“Yeah, who cares about some light torture,” Raven deadpans.

“Anyway,” Miller cuts in, “Cage is in custody and the feds are trying to get him to flip on his old man. He let us know that they made Bellamy right around the time of the shootout because they’d already figured out that other guy was a mole, so that’s another thing we can blame the Bureau for, I guess. They were just keeping him around until they found out his contacts in prostitution were fake, too.”

“I should’ve known something was up when they worked so hard to keep me alive,” Bellamy mutters.

Raven shrugs. “If it makes you feel better, no one from APD or the Bureau really figured out what the Wallaces were up to.”

“Great, I have so much faith in our law enforcement,” Octavia replies, to general grumbles.

“When can I get out of bed?” Clarke asks, just as a nurse walks in.

“I see you’re awake,” the man says, giving her a smile as he checks her chart. “You got lucky in that the bullet didn’t hit anything vital; it was mostly a flesh wound. You’ll be good to go after we monitor you for a couple more hours.”

“Are you sure that’s long enough?” Bellamy asks, frowning, and Octavia mutters something that sounds suspiciously like “hypocrite” as Clarke rolls her eyes.

They do discharge her by late afternoon, despite Bellamy’s concerns, and by then it’s only him and her left. The hospital gives her a crutch to use in case her side hurts too much to put full pressure on her foot, but she manages to hobble into her apartment with minimal difficulty. Once inside, she shrugs off her jacket and turns to stare at Bellamy in her living room, afternoon sunlight bright as it catches the freckles dusting his cheeks, the sweep of his eyelashes.

He's already fussing over her, making sure she sits down properly and has a pillow behind her back; she can't help the smile that creeps over her face as she watches him grab a glass from her kitchen cabinet and fill it with water. Eight months and he still knows exactly where her cups are.

"Thank you," she says when he hands her the glass and settles onto the seat next to her. She watches him over the rim as she takes a sip. He looks... nervous, almost, and for the first time in nearly a year, she's sure of what she needs to do.

She leans into his side, head tucked under his jaw, and feels him relax into her.

They'll have time to talk about what's happened in the last eight months, days and weeks and years of discussing every minute. She'll wake up some nights sure that he's still gone, and other nights he'll watch her breathe as she sleeps, checking for the steady rise and fall of her chest. He won't be able to tell her about some of the things he saw while undercover for a long time, and it'll take even longer to tell her some of the things he did. But for now, as spring sunlight filters long and yellow into her apartment, she takes time to feel his warmth underneath her shoulder, the reassuring reverberations of his heart as it beats slow and steady. 

“Hi,” he says eventually, and it’s like a weight has slipped off her chest.

“Hi,” she replies, looking up at him, and watches a smile illuminate his face.

**Author's Note:**

> tbh YOU deserve kudos for getting all the way to the end, thank you so much for reading!!


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